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An anonymous reader writes "Android devices are pretty much falling out of the sky here and there, with mini-PCs of all shapes and sizes being announced almost every day.

Sure, they're underpowered and the applications aren't yet up to desktop standards, but what if that changed? Would Android become "smarter" and sophisticated enough to replace laptops (or even desktops) even as Windows 8 is dumbed down into a former shade of itself?"Link to Original Source

Forget working or web surfing while the car drives you somewhere... why even be conscious and have to remember the time it takes to get somewhere?

I want self-driving sleeper cars.

Everywhere within 8 hours drive would be just a night's sleep away. Get off work on Friday, sleep, wake up in some mid-point town with a dozen friends from different cities, party for the weekend, as I sleep Sunday night the car gets me back to where I work.

Largest app store by an order of magnitude (i seldom pay for anything, tons of free stuff available that do what I want)

Just to be a bit pedantic, "order of magnitude" is false. Android's Market has about 66000 applications, Apple's App Store has something just over 200000. So about three times larger. Three times is not an order of magnitude.

It's a pity the advertisers won (at least they seem to have done so at the moment) the race against micropayments for how to fund "progress" on the web. Great swaths of the web falling into TV2 type drivel seems almost inevitable now. [This comment brought to you by Folgers.]

Wouldn't it make the problem easier if the towels had some corner highlighting and a pattern to show the orientation? Then the company that sells you the towel folding robot can be sure to have a towel customer for a while.

Norsefire writes "A Parrot named Strawberry performed better than many humans in an investment competition. The human competitors were able to select any stock they wanted while the Parrot randomly selected the stocks with its beak. Strawberry had a 13.7% return, the human average was a 4.6% loss. Only two humans outperformed Strawberry."

Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at Imperial College London have created detailed 3D computer models of two fossilized specimens of ancient creatures called Cryptomartus hindi and Eophrynus prestvicii, closely related to modern-day spiders. The researchers created their images by using a CT scanning device, which enabled them to take 3,000 x-rays of each fossil then compile them into precise 3D models, using custom-designed software. Both spiders roamed the Earth before the dinnosaurs during the Carboniferous period, 359 — 299 million years ago when life was emerging from the oceans to live on land. C. hindi's front pair of legs were angled toward the front, suggesting they were used to grapple with prey, an "ambush predator" like the modern-day crab spider, lying in wait for prey to come close. Another finding from the models is that E. prestivicii had hard spikes along its back, probably as a defensive measure making it less palatable to the amphibians that would have hunted it. "Our models almost bring these ancient creatures back to life and it's really exciting to be able to look at them in such detail," says researcher Russel Garwood adding that the technique could be used to return to fossils that have previously been analyzed by conventional means. "Our study helps build a picture of what was happening during this period early in the history of life on land.""

gollum123 writes "Time magazine reports on new data that shows women are already earning less than men before the ink on their college diplomas has dried ( http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1 613829,00.html ). The study, which looked at more than 10,000 people who received bachelor's degrees in 1999-2000, found that just one year after graduation, women who are working full time earn only 80% as much as their male counterparts do. The recent graduate numbers includes an apples-to-apples comparison of full-time workers who majored in the same subject, and the discrepancies are jarring. One year after graduation, female business majors are earning 81% of what male business majors earn. Among biology majors, women get paid only 75% as much as men. female engineers make 95% of what male engineering majors do, and women who majored in math earn only 76% of what their male counterparts earn. Part of the gap may be explained by the number of hours women work compared with men. But after controlling for all the factors known to affect wages — including occupation and parenthood — the study found that college-educated women still earn about 5% less than college-educated men one year after graduation and 12% 10 years after graduation. This gap, the study's authors go on to say, "remains unexplained and may be attributed to discrimination.""

I'm a graduate student type that wishes he could figure out what to do with the 45 years (or so) of life he has left. To reach a stable adult life, I'm studying electrical engineering, but it is always with an eye toward my predilection for cognitive science.